(Phys.org)—PKS 1302-102 is one of the few known quasars with a pair of black holes within its accretion disc. It is also a curious case for astronomers as it will produce a powerful explosion when these two black holes ...

The Soft X-ray focusing Telescope (SXT) onboard Astrosat, India's first satellite dedicated to astronomical observations, saw its first light from an astronomical source on Oct. 26, 2015, after the camera door was opened ...

The baffling and strange behaviors of black holes have become somewhat less mysterious recently, with new observations from NASA's Explorer missions Swift and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The two ...

When a star comes too close to a black hole, the intense gravity of the black hole results in tidal forces that can rip the star apart. In these events, called tidal disruptions, some of the stellar debris is flung outward ...

Within modern cosmology, the Big Bang marks the beginning of the universe and the creation of matter, space and time about 13.8 billion years ago. Since then, the visible structures of the cosmos have developed: billions ...

Human understanding of galaxies and black holes is being called into question after an 11-year search for mysterious gravitational waves—famously predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago—failed to find anything.

A paper coauthored by Tom Maccarone, a Texas Tech University associate professor in the Department of Physics, studies one of the most important but least understood processes in astronomy: accretion, or the growth in mass ...

Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity.

One hundred years since Einstein proposed gravitational waves as part of his general theory of relativity, an 11-year search performed with CSIRO's Parkes telescope has failed to detect them, casting doubt on our understanding ...

Supermassive black hole

A supermassive black hole is a black hole with a mass of the order of between 105 and 1010 solar masses. Most, if not all, galaxies, including the Milky Way, are believed to contain supermassive black holes at their centers.

Supermassive black holes have properties which distinguish them from their relatively low-mass cousins: